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While the U.S. Constitution clearly did not take into consideration any tweets by our founding fathers, it is probably safe to assume that Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson would have loved to tweet their opinions as much as they loved to write for the newspapers of their day (sometimes under anonymous pseudonyms similar to today’s twitter user names).  Those men, and countless soldiers in service to this nation, have risked their lives for our right to tweet or to post an article on Facebook; but that is not the same as arguing that those public tweets are protected.  The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts.  What you give to the public belongs to the public.  What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.

In my own classes I've been deliberately vague about what students should tweet about. I didn’t want overly prescriptive guidelines to constrain what might be possible. Instead, I wanted our integration of Twitter to evolve organically. Given this open-ended invitation, I’ve found students tend to use Twitter for class in three ways: to post news and share resources relevant to the class; to ask questions and respond with clarifications about the readings; and to write sarcastic, irreverent comments about the readings or my teaching. The first two behaviors add to the community spirit of the class and help to sustain student interest across the days and weeks of the semester. The third behavior, when I first noticed it, was an utterly unexpected finding. (And as I've argued elsewhere, it was a good, powerful surprise that legitimated my use of Twitter in and outside of the classroom. I saw students take an oppositional stance in their writing—a welcome reprieve from the majority of student writing, which avoids taking any stance at all.)

I strongly recommend creating a permanent Twitter archive. A free service such as TwapperKeeper will track a specified hashtag, collecting the tweets 24/7, and you simply return to TwapperKeeper any time to download the archive. It's so easy to use that I've begun creating TwapperKeeper archives for any hashtag there's even the slightest chance I'll be interested in revisiting later. Another useful archiving tool is called, appropriately enough, The Archivist.

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The social-networking giant has opened its first-ever office in Asia—in the country where being all up in one another's business is practically a birthright.

Shashi Tharoor, the country's junior minister for foreign affairs, has become a major national celebrity thanks to his tweets, the candor of some of which has got him into trouble with the fustier, unwired elements of the cabinet to which he belongs. Tharoor has nearly 700,000 followers, putting him in the top 10 of the world's tweeting politicians. (He is almost certainly the only one who writes every tweet himself.)

most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world. "I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," says one person in the study. "I feel like most people these days are in a similar situation, for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."

what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family

they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away